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Biography

Early Musical Career

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work. When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music.

From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements.

In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy.

Music

Early Years (1890-1902)

The works of Bartok’s youth were written in a classical and early romantic style touched with influences of popular and Gypsy music. Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 piano pieces with corresponding opus numbers. Although most of these were simple dance pieces, in these early works Bartok began to tackle some more advanced forms, as in his ten-part programmatic A Duna folyása (“The Course of the Danube”, 1890–94), which he played in his first public recital in 1892. In catholic grammar school Bartok took to studying the scores of composers “from Bach to Wagner”, his compositions now advancing in style and taking on similarities to Schumann and Brahms . Following his matriculation into the Budapest Academy in 1890 he composed very little, though he began to work on exercises in orchestration and familiarized himself thoroughly with the operas of Wagner. In 1902 his creative energies were revitalized the discovery of the music of Richard Strauss, whose tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, according to Bartok, “stimulated the greatest enthusiasm in me; at last I saw the way that lay before me”. Bartok also owned the score to A Hero’s Life, which he transcribed for the piano and committed to memory.

New Influences (1903-11)

Under the influence of Strauss Bartók composed in 1903 Kossuth, a symphonic poem in ten tableaux on the subject of the 1848 Hungarian war of independence, reflecting the composer's growing interest in musical nationalism . A year later he renewed his opus numbers with the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra serving as Opus 1. Driven by nationalistic fervor and a desire to transcend the influence of prior composers, Bartok began a lifelong devotion to folk music which was sparked by his overhearing nanny Lidi Dósa’s singing of Transylvanian folk songs at a Hungarian resort in 1904 . Bartók began to collect Magyar peasant melodies, later extending to the folk music of other peoples of the Carpathian Basin . His compositional output would gradually prune away romantic elements in favour of an idiom that embodied folk music as intrinsic and essential to its style. Later in life he would have this to say on the incorporation of folk and art music:

The question is, what are the ways in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into modern music? We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied, write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases. This kind of work would show a certain analogy with Bach's treatment of chorales. ... Another method ... is the following: the composer does not make use of a real peasant melody but invents his own imitation of such melodies. There is no true difference between this method and the one described above. ... There is yet a third way ... Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music. In this case we may say, he has completely absorbed the idiom of peasant music which has become his musical mother tongue.

Recordings

Together with his like-minded contemporary Zoltan Kodaly, Bartok embarked on an extensive programme of field research to capture the folk and peasant melodies of Magyar, Slovak and Rumanian language territories. At first they would transcribe the melodies by hand, but later they began to use a wax cylinder recording machine invented by Thomas Edison. Compilations of Bartók’s field recordings, interviews, and original piano playing have been released over the years, largely by the Hungarian record label Hungaroton:

• Bartók, Béla. 1994. Bartók at the Piano. Hungaroton 12326. 6-CD set.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995a. Bartok Plays Bartok – Bartok at the Piano 1929–41. Pearl 9166. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995b. Bartók Recordings from Private Collections. Hungaroton 12334. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2003. Bartók Plays Bartók. Pearl 179. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2007. Bartók: Contrasts, Mikrokosmos. Membran/Documents 223546. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2008. Bartok Plays Bartok. Urania 340. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2016. Bartók the Pianist. Hungaroton HCD32790-91. Two CDs. Works by Bartók, Domenico Scarlatti, Zoltán Kodály, and Franz Liszt.

A compilation of field recordings and transcriptions for two violas was also recently released by Tantara Records in 2014.

On 18 March 2016 Decca Classics released Béla Bartók: The Complete Works, the first ever complete compilation of all of Bartók's compositions, including new recordings of never-before-recorded early piano and vocal works. However, none of the composer's own performances are included in this 32-disc set .